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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24328315">Cooking Lesson with the Toy Soldier</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fracnkie/pseuds/fracnkie'>fracnkie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>How to Make Friends with Your Toy Soldier [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Mechanisms (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Am i projecting? maybe, Found Family, Friendship Through Cooking, Gen, I just find something very warm and nice about cooking with friends and family, no I did not make it, the mechs are a loving found family and I will kill anyone who says otherwise, yes I keep putting cooking in my fics don't ask why, yes this is an actual recipe, you can pry marius and toy soldier friendship from my cold dead hands</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 05:53:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,639</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24328315</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fracnkie/pseuds/fracnkie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Marius is really starting to wonder why nobody lets the Toy Soldier cook</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Marius von Raum &amp; The Toy Soldier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>How to Make Friends with Your Toy Soldier [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1783078</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>224</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Cooking Lesson with the Toy Soldier</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks to KersPastei for being a lovely beta whenever I decide to write things at weird hours. Recipe in the endnotes as a link because it very much isn't my recipe. Also, sorry for the abundance of tags, I have a problem.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It’s… cooking. Well, at least that’s what Marius thinks it’s trying to do. It seems very frustrated as it tries to whisk a bowl full of what Marius thinks is batter but its wrist seems to lock and click and generally flail from the weird angle it’s using. The counter is a relative mess of overturned ingredients and the cookbook is covered in flour, propped up on the sugar sack that’s slipping out onto the floor like a sand timer. A sand timer that someone is bound to complain about if left unattended.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What in the universe are you making?” Marius asks from the doorway, slowly making his way in to address the mess it’s made. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Toy Soldier freezes, clicking into a statue-like form like a child caught eating something they shouldn’t. It lays eyes on Marius and smiles, setting down the bowl with a clatter.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nothing!” it lies, which is a surprise to Marius because the Toy Soldier tends not to lie unless it thinks it’s funny. “Sorry!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What are you sorry for?” Marius asks, stepping up to the counter. He shoots a glance at the cookbook and sees that it’s open to a screen on teacakes, though a lot of it is stained with vanilla, chocolate, and flour. “I mean you usually clean up your messes so it’s probably fine.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’m not supposed to cook or bake,” the Toy Soldier explains with a smile, but somehow a bit drawn in. “I waste the ingredients.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So you’re just not allowed to cook because you mess it up?” he asks, dusting the flour off of the open page.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jonny doesn’t like it when I stain his cookbook,” it says instead of answering, watching Marius clean the page off.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why does Jonny have a southern cooking cookbook?” Marius mutters under his breath as he glances over the recipe.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He’s from New Texas,” the Toy Soldier says. “Well, he says he is. He also says he made it up. It’s a funny story, have you heard the song?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, not yet,” he says, going over the ingredients. “How about I help you make this so if Jonny gets mad, he’ll blame me instead.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh that sounds like jolly good fun!” the Toy Soldier says excitedly. “No one ever likes to cook with me so I don’t cook.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marius furrows his eyebrows. He wants to say something about how rude that sounds but decides against it and instead starts to gather the ingredients up again. To be fair, it seems like the Toy Soldier had just gathered the ingredients and ignored the actual instructions so instead of trying to salvage it, he pours the batter into the trash compactor and asks the Toy Soldier to clean everything up so he can get everything together.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Soon they have a clean kitchen and a neat pile of ingredients on the counter. Marius has gathered enough ingredients for two batches because he definitely doesn’t just want 24 teacakes when Jonny, Tim, and Nastya seem to eat up any baked good with the speed of an octokitten. ½ cups unsalted butter, ½ cup butter-flavored shortening, 2 cups granulated sugar, 2 eggs, 2 lemons to zest, a whole scraped vanilla bean, 4 cups all-purpose flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon nutmeg, and ½ cup buttermilk. He is quite lucky they have it all on hand but he suspects that the Toy Soldier has all the ingredients cataloged somewhere in its… no-brain so that it knows what can be baked.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Alright, TS, put the butter and shortening in a large bowl,” Marius instructs, leaning forward and squinting closely at the letters on the page. God, the writing was small.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Tally-ho!” the Toy Soldier cheered.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It gingerly gathers up the ingredients and tosses them lightly into the larger bowl it had been trying to mix the ingredients in together. Slowly, slowly, Marius and the Toy Soldier mixed the dry ingredients, turned the vanilla bean into a paste, zested the lemons without cutting off anyone’s fingers, – wooden, metal, or flesh, – and mix in all the dry ingredients. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marius kneads the dough while TS cleans the counter of any stray ingredients that had managed to spill and seems to be cleaning it to a polish. Marius had decided that it was probably best because of how it looks like TS needs to sand its fingers again. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So why does no one like when you cook?” Marius asks, eyes trained onto the dough with a concentrated look.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“They say I always make it wrong,” the Toy Soldier says with a jolly tone. Marius can still hear it cleaning but the rate at which it scrubs at the counter seems to get slightly frantic. “I don’t know what they mean by that. I use all the ingredients I need but they always say it’s wrong. Oh well, I just cook when they’re not looking. As long as they don’t see me cook they usually ignore it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No one tells you what you did wrong?” he pushes, looking up from the dough he’s kneading.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nope!” it cheers. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. I think Jonny said that I’m not supposed to put teeth in it so I put in wooden teeth instead. The doctor always found it funny when I put in the teeth. I don’t know why Jonny doesn’t think it’s funny, he eats people.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, well,” Marius mumbles slightly, only growing more upset by the second. “Uhm… Teeth are hard to chew on. They’re also easy to choke on and people don’t like choking while eating, even when they can’t die. People only like hard things in their food if they taste good, like nuts and things that that. Even fake teeth are hard to bite through and can break your real teeth when you bite down.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh!” the Toy Soldier exclaimed, genuinely surprised. “I never thought of that! My teeth don’t break when gnawing on teeth, they’re very fun to gnaw on. Gum gets stuck in my teeth so I can’t use that. Jonny and Ashes smoke instead of chewing on things. Nastya and Raphaella like to chew on pens.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think I used to get in trouble when I ate paper,” Marius laughs. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He flattens the dough out into a disk on top of some plastic wrap. He gingerly sets it in the fridge and turns the egg timer on the counter to one hour.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Well, that wasn’t so hard,” he says, hands on his hips in a proud way. “Now you know how to properly make teacakes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why did you put it in the fridge?” the Toy Soldier asks. “We weren’t done, old chap.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It needs to rise it a bit, TS,” Marius explains. “We’ll take it out in an hour and make it into the tea cake shapes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think it would be very fun to leave it as the large disk,” it suggests.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It would, but that would be a lot harder to both eat and bake,” he says, making his way toward one of the tables. There’s a stack of books in the middle of this one next to yet another mahjongg set. How many mahjongg sets are on this ship anyway?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Toy Soldier sits across from it and pulls its mandolin out from under the table, where it had apparently been sitting instead of in the music room where it should be. Idly, it begins strumming. Marius doesn’t really know what the Toy Soldier does in its free time but he’s starting to get a good idea. According to Ashes and Jonny, it likes to carve teeth some times. According to Nastya, Raph, and Ivy, it makes a very good cup of tea. According to Brian and Tim, it also likes to participate in violence but only if everyone else is also having fun. Now, according to Marius, it also likes to strum the mandolin and hide the fact that it likes to bake because apparently no one else thinks it should and that fact is very distressing.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What are you playing?” Marius asks after a time. He had pulled his own notebook by now and was writing down some lyric ideas without actually thinking about a rhyming scheme, just putting down sentences he thinks sound nice.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Jonny gave me new sheet music for the next song cycle,” the Toy Soldier says. “I think you have some songs to sing but he gives me the sheet music first because I memorize it. He tests out the sounds with me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That sounds nice, actually,” Marius says, somewhat surprised. “So only you and Jonny have heard this set?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nastya has heard a bit,” it says. “Jonny usually composes while down in the engineering deck.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t even know where those are,” he mumbles, scribbling a drawing of an engine into the margins of his notes. He hasn’t worked on any engineering since he got his dumb arm and really that was regrettable. Still, it wasn’t like Nastya was going to let him do repairs on the Aurora. It wasn’t like he knew how either. Robots and biomechanical ships were very different things. “How long have you been on the Aurora anyway?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marius hears a creak and looks up to see the Toy Soldier shrugging with that same wooden smile on its face. He knows the thing can frown, it just doesn’t do it often. “I don’t remember,” it says. “I was here before Gunpowder Tim, I remember that. I was also here before the doctor fell out of the airlock. I was in the Red Rose war without and with my friends. They say time shenanigans, I think it’s funny I got to be in it twice. I helped Gunpowder Tim blow up the moon, which was jolly good fun and violence.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So you just don’t remember?” he asks, surprised.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not important, old chap!” its smile is wider but its eyes are still watching its own fingers on the mandolin. “As long as I have my friends, it doesn’t really matter when I met them!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s-” Marius starts, but the sudden ringing of the timer makes him jump.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh!” the Toy Soldier exclaims, setting down the mandolin. “Is the dough done, Baron Marius von Raum?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just Marius is fine,” he says quickly. “Also, yeah, it is. Can you find me a circle cookie cutter?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Right-o, Marius!” it says, saluting as it stands. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marius goes over to the refrigerator and pulls out the plastic-wrapped disk from one of the center shelves. Luckily, the fridge itself is rather large even so full of random food and food-adjacent that it is. The Toy Soldier finds the cookiecutter quickly from one of the drawers and saddles up next to Marius, who sets the dough on the counter and finally unwraps it. He leans over the oven and starts to preheat it, hoping no one messed with it in a way that can cause the kitchen to catch fire once again. As long as Ashes wasn’t in here recently it should be fine. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“TS, find a baking sheet and put parchment paper all along the bottom of it,” he instructs, starting to knead the dough again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Once again, the Toy Soldier salutes and does as told. Marius bites his lip. He needs to remember to phrase things differently because that definitely sounded like an order. He doesn’t want to make it do things it doesn’t want to do, even though it’s probably happy to do so. He files it in the back of his brain and instead focusses on the tea cake dough. Eventually, TS is standing next to him as he kneads it, which doesn’t take too long.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Why is the Toy Soldier in the kitchen?” a voice calls from the doorway closest to the kitchen area of the commons.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Marius looked up from where he was digging a rolling pin out of the cupboards. Jonny stood in the doorway, looking very unamused with his arms crossed over his chest. Marius suppressed a scowl and swung the rolling pin out of the cupboard and slung it over his shoulder like it was a suitable weapon when Jonny definitely carried a gun on him at all times. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’re making teacakes!” the Toy Soldier says cheerily.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Did you put teeth in it again?” he asks, though he sounds more bemused now. Marius still eyes him while he starts to roll out the dough.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, sir!” it says, giving a salute. “Marius says that people don’t like to chew on teeth.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Maybe if you actually explained why not to do things, it won’t do them,” Marius suggests, voice thick with contempt. “For the number of people with weird quirks on one ship, you could at least ask why it thinks teeth should go in food instead of just getting mad when it does.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I just thought it was obvious,” Jonny says, though he says it under his breath with a tinge of hesitance. Well, close enough to regret in Jonny’s case, Marius thinks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It likes to chew on teeth like you like to smoke and Nastya likes to chew on pens until the ink explodes,” Marius quips with a smile. He stops rolling the dough out. “Toy Soldier, would you mind cutting out circles with the cookiecutter? Try to get the most circles out of the dough.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Okay, Marius!” it says with an excited smile.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Jonny looks between Marius and the Toy Soldier, a look of confusion on his face as he takes in the scene. There’s no mess. His cookbook is sitting open but with significantly less of a mess on the page than he expected when he found the Toy Soldier in here. There no teeth or odd things that people can’t ingest in the dough. He thinks about it a little more. Had anyone ever explained what a person can and cannot eat to the Toy Soldier? He knows it knows how to make tea and likes its tea a certain way, though he suspects that was a learned habit if nothing else, and really likes teatime food. Jonny had once made cucumber sandwiches for it and Ivy, mostly to get them both to stop chattering about it, but he distinctly remembers poisoning one of them to see what happens and noticing that the Toy Soldier didn’t exactly react to poison like a person would, as in dying.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He sighs and walks over closer to the counter, letting his arms fall to his side. The two of them seemed to have made a double batch, which is good with the appetite of the people on this ship. Marius is moving the teacake circles onto a pan covered with parchment paper and the Toy Soldier is making great use of the dough they had. Eventually, it runs out of space to take the circles out of, but it still has plenty of dough.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Marius, I am out of dough,” it says, turning at the waist.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, yeah, let me just,” Marius says quietly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He dusts off his hands and turns to knead and roll the dough again, only to turn and see Jonny pick up the dough himself and slightly hip bump the Toy Soldier to the side, though in kind of a gentle, non-intrusive way. The Toy Soldier shifts over and Jonny starts to knead the dough, doing it a lot more gently than Marius had. Both Marius and the Toy Soldier watch as Jonny kneads and rolls and kneads and rolls until it’s how he likes it and then move over again so the Toy Soldier can cut more circles out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Fifteen minutes later, the teacakes finish cooling and the three of them have tea and teacakes and cucumber sandwiches that Jonny showed the Toy Soldier how to make in exchange for the Toy Soldier showing him exactly how it makes his tea taste so good.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Find me @fracnkie or @bryon-von-raum on tumblr.<br/>Recipe: https://divascancook.com/old-fashioned-tea-cakes-recipe-authentic-southern/<br/>Haven't tried it, may or may not work, I don't actually bake often.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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